


Bonds

by pirategirljack



Category: 12 Monkeys (TV)
Genre: 12 monkeys theme week 2016, Bonding, Comfort, F/M, Fireside Chats, Missing Scenes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-12
Updated: 2016-07-12
Packaged: 2018-07-23 15:41:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7469373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pirategirljack/pseuds/pirategirljack
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>12 Monkeys Theme Week Day 2 - Theories</p><p>Zeit and Whitley talk about Jones.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bonds

**Author's Note:**

> I don't really know how to make Theories into stories, so I'm going to post random scene-bits on this day! Also, after 2.12, these two really just need a break.

Zeit had never been around so many men for so long a time before her name was Hannah and she’d lost both mothers in one day. One of them, she got back--but it was not the same, having this woman as young and wild as she, wilder, with so similar a voice and face and so different a wisdom. The other, she feared she would never see again. The Facility had crumbled to dust almost before she could go, there was no way she could have survived, and Zeit knew deep in her bones that she wouldn’t see her again in this life...and yet she hoped. That James would find a way. That Cassie would, if he couldn’t. She barely knew them, had only spoken to them a handful of times, but she saw how Mother trusted them. She saw how she held them when they went.

She’d liked them, and missed them, too. They were why she was alive.

She hoped they could do what she could not.

The men were strange, feral, untrained. Even the ones who had been soldiers were barely better, given the clothes and the guns, but raised without the discipline, most of them.  
Whitley, though. He took the title seriously. He had been loyal to her mother, even when he worked against her; she had been mad, when it happened, couldn’t see how anyone could turn against Katarina Jones, but now, days and weeks later, as they’d lived together in the camp and she had seen how he grieved, her anger flared out and faded.

Now she just felt a sort of strange kinship.

They had lost the same woman. They had similar holes in their hearts.

She sat beside him one night as he stared into the fire that held back the dark, and after a while, she touched the back of his hand, lightly. He startled; he hadn’t expected her to be there, had been lost in his thoughts.

“Where did these scars come from?” she asked, running her fingertips along the ridge that traced a line between the bones of his hand. There was a matching one on the other hand.

He smiled, but there was no humor. “Deacon,” he said, lifting his chin to indicate the tall man telling some war story across the camp, and the Daughters challenging his truthfulness as they all laughed. Zeit did not feel like laughing.

“How?”

“When he first arrived, when he let the Messengers in. They caught me patrolling, killed my men. Made an example of me.”

“How?”

He finally looked at her, eyed her as if taking her measure. “It’s not pretty.”

“Scars rarely are.”

Another pause, not long. “He pinned my hands to the severed skull of one of my men, a knife through each one.”

Zeit startled this time. Deacon claimed he was a different man than the one who had betrayed them at the start, but she had a hard time reconciling the one she saw with the one in the tale, and it frightened her. Men were devious, Mother had said. They tricked you.

Whitley snorted. “As I said. Gruesome.”

“Thank you for telling me. Too many of the men try to spare me these things, as if I’m unable to bear them. As if I am weak.”

“You’re not weak,” Whitley said. “No more weak than your mother was.” He flattened his lips after that, didn’t say more. 

“You miss her.”

“I do.”

“You loved her.”

A long, long breath in. “I do.”

“How?”

“Jones chose me to lead her exit from Spearhead. Do you know Spearhead? It was where we weathered the plague, years ago. Soldiers everywhere, mostly military. But she picked me, me, to lead the few who would go with her, and the scientists who went with her. I idolized her. My whole life, almost. She was so strong.” He choked, looked away, and she could see the muscles working in his jaw to master himself. “I believed in her. And I turned on her.”

“You did what you felt was right.”

“It wasn’t right.”

“And you know that now. Learn from it. Do not repeat your mistakes.”

He leveled that assessing gaze on her again, studied her closely, and she met his eye and didn’t flinch. Men were duplicitous. But this one was honest. She could see it as well as he could see whatever he was looking for in her.

“I won’t,” he said. 

And from that day on, he was by her side whenever she needed him, though he never once questioned her skill. He’d made a promise, and he kept it.


End file.
